Joel Kontinen
Nobel Prize-winning American scientist James Watson has been stripped of his honorary titles at Cold Spring Harbor after repeating comments about race and intelligence.
In a TV programme, James Watson, a pioneer in DNA studies made a reference to a view that genes cause a difference on average between blacks and whites on IQ tests.
In 2007 he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really".
He has repeated the error, after which Cold Spring Harbor.
They think his views are reprehensible, unsupported by science. this shows how far science has advanced from the days of Charles Darwin, who had some nasty things about Africans;
In his book Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) Darwin predicted, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes. . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.” (vol. 1, p. 201).
Source:
James Watson: Scientist loses titles after claims over race BBC NEWS (13 January)
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